The Second Most Important Question in the World

There’s a lot to be said for business intelligence practitioners being responsive and being able to deliver to and meet the needs of their clients quickly and much has been written about the benefits of BI teams partnering with their business colleagues in order to provide the best outcomes and value.

But doing so shouldn’t just be interpreted as giving business users everything they ask for as fast as humanly possible. Across my career I’ve found one simple two word question very powerful. That question is: “so what?”

The value of asking "so what" comes partly from asking the “how will you use this data?”, “what decisions will it inform?”  type questions, but it is even more powerful when turned around. Ask the question: “If I didn't have that data available to me - so what?" If the answer is something along the lines of: “I wouldn't know that we had a preventable problem and in 5 minutes there'd be raw sewage running down the main street” then it's worth doing something about. Write that report, enable those analytics – and do it quickly. However, if the answer sounds more like: “I might need that extra piece of information one day”, then perhaps let's wait for one day to come before we spend the effort, time and money.

In today's climate funding and resourcing are not what they once were in BI. There are few open cheque books left and those of us managing the function have to work with other leaders in our organisations to prioritise. Not only does working on low value things demoralise the members of the BI team, it's also an opportunity cost to the organisation. Working on a low value or low impact requests means that something else, something that may have enabled a better decision, led to time saved, a lower cost to serve or a customer prevented from churning was pushed aside and missed.

The “so what?” question is a powerful one. Just be careful how you ask it, and never presume to know the answer or to be able to second-guess your business colleagues!

And, as to the matter of the [first] most important question in the world. Having just spent two weeks travelling long distances on planes and in cars whilst on holiday with my kids I can assure you that the most important question in the world is “ARE WE THERE YET?”

The Hidden Properties of SAP Business Objects Dashboards

Aka: What to do when the Properties window of SAP Business Objects Dashboards isn't visible.

Having had this happen to me three times now on three separate laptops, and also having spent, and lost, countless hours looking (largely unsuccessfully - until now) for a way to remedy the situation I thought this one deserved a blog post. So here goes. Hopefully the next person who strikes this problem can solve it with a five minute Google rather than a five hour session of window movement and software uninstalls and re-installs.

My problem originally occurred with SAP Business Objects Dashboards 4.0. I'd been happily working with the product for about a year with no problems until one morning I plugged in my laptop and opened up an existing dashboard to find that the Properties window was nowhere to be seen. No matter what I did I couldn't make it visible. I tried everything I could think of:

• A Google search;
• An SCN search;
• Right-clicking an object and selecting Properties;
• Highlighting an object and using the Alt-Enter keyboard shortcut;
• Highlighting an object and Selecting View->Properties for the menus;
• Using keyboard shortcuts to give the Properties window focus and then moving it with the keyboard arrows thinking it may have been hidden off screen or somehow thinking that it was on an extended display on another monitor;
• Plugging in a second monitor and then toggling which display was primary and which was extended.

All of these were tried (several times) but to no avail. Next I bit the bullet and tried re-installing the software. Several hours later I found that the Properties window still had an extreme case of shyness and wouldn't show up on my screen.

Luckily, not too much later, I was in line for a laptop update so when my laptop arrived with a fresh install of the Dashboards software all was fine once more - the Properties window was no longer hidden..........at least for about three weeks when the problem re-occurred. Faced with this situation I did what any good manager would do and gave the dashboard work to someone else to take care of.

A week or so ago I moved to another new more portable laptop and installed SAP Dashboards 4.1 on it. Hardly daring to look, I opened up my first dashboard, and .............. joy of joys - I had a Properties window once more. Or at least I did until this evening.  It was there when I left work at 6pm, but not there when I logged back on to my laptop at 9pm. Facing a looming deadline to publish some new corporate dashboards and with no more budget to change laptops again I decided to dive into the Registry.   I found the key that sound about right, exported it for safety,  and started flicking through each of the sub-keys looking for anything that sounded like it might be about window positions, toolbar settings or last saved details. After numerous failed attempts to reset values in keys that looked to fit the bill, and urged on by the dulcet tones of Peter Gabriel, I pulled out the sledgehammer and deleted all of the sub keys under the settings key. I figured / hoped that they would be rebuilt next time I opened the Dashboards tool and I'd trigger a reset to factory settings type operation by brute force. With fingers crossed I re-opened Dashboards, and there it was in all it's glory - the Properties window: 

So, should you find yourself unable to make the Properties window show itself fire up Regedit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER>Software>SAP Business Objects>Dashboards>Settings>en

From there delete every subkey under en. Don't delete the en subkey as well, as that seems to render Dashboards unable to start. 

I've tried to identify the specific subkey that needs to be deleted, but with no luck. But that doesn't seem to matter as deleting them all fixes the problem and doesn't seem to have any nasty side-effects. 

This works for a Dashboards 4.1 system and I suspect it would also work for Dashboards 4.0 and probably even for earlier Celsius versions too.

If anyone else has experienced this problem and has figured out what triggers it, I'd love to hear from you!

LCMs - Oldies Just Don't Get It!

Here in Australia we have a breakfast bar that goes by the name LCMs. For those of you that don't know them, they're much like the Rice Krispie Squares found in other parts of the world. The marketing folks behind LCMs appealed to the kids market with the tagline: "LCMs - Oldies Just Don't Get It".

Recently I've been dealing with another LCM - the Life Cycle Management component within SAP's Business Objects suite. Strictly speaking, it's now known as Promotion Management, but I'm old school enough to still think of it as LCM.

Now, I'm all for the style of deployment that Promotion Management enables, but recently I've struck an odd error with its use that perplexes me. There's one think about LCM that this oldie doesn't get!

Recently I've had to turn my hand to something that it's been a while since I've done. I've had to play 3rd level support / SysAdmin to a production Business Objects reporting environment and its supporting development and testing tiers. Some new developers had joined a project using these environments to bring in some new WebI reports along with a few tweaks to the Universe. All went well until one of the new folks tried to promote a report between the development and testing tiers. The nature of the data in play means that the two tiers aren't allowed to have a communications path between them so the promotion needed to make use of a BIAR file. When attempting to create the promotion job after importing the BIAR file to the test server the developer was getting an odd, and not particularly graceful error. It read:

"AjaxRequestThrowsError":"True"

Attempting the same task with a user with admin rights was successful and, interestingly, so was undertaking the task when signed in as one of the original developers.

Effectively this seemed to rule out something more basic wrong with Promotion Management on that box. So, to me this looked like a permissions issue at heart. My first instinct was to look to see if the new developers had been granted to access to use Promotion Management. Aha! None of the new folks had access to the Promotion Jobs folder on the test server. Surely that's the problem.

Easily fixed. A quick application of user security and back to the developers to test. No luck - the same error we'd seen earlier persisted. Now I'm no masochist and I'm far to busy to re-invent the wheel, so off I went to ask Google and SCN. Sure enough both came back with a number of hits that described the same error, but none that matched our case or symptoms closely enough for my liking. So, like it or not, there was a bit more digging to be done. Through a process of comparison and elimination I noticed that there was one group membership that the new developers were lacking. Digging some more showed that this membership gave access (Full Control)  to the folder on the test server that the WebI report to be promoted would live in. And sure, enough after adding one of the new developers to this group the Promotion Management error disappeared and he was able to successfully promote via BIAR file.

Problem solved!

However, one puzzling aspect the remains for me is why this particular error was thrown on the creation of the promotion job and not on the execution of the promotion itself. Even more confusing was the fact that when we temporarily allowed a communications path between the the development and test servers the developer was able to successfully directly promote his changes from server to server (i.e. taking out the need for the BIAR file) even before we'd add the group membership.

With luck, if I ever have to solve the same problem again, this blog post will prompt me to remember the solution without the need for the investigations that went along this time. Even better, it may help someone else being confronted and confused by the same error!

Even better again, if you can shed some light on this odd set of behaviour, I'd love to hear from you. If I'm missing the obvious here, please point it out to me. This oldie doesn't mind it if he's able to get this LCM! And I'm sure the marketing folks as Kellogs won't care either!

The Desire Paths in Your Data

On the days that I drive to work I have around a one mile walk from my car park to my office. There's one particular spot where I can take a shortcut by going off the paved path and cutting across some open ground. It saves me a minute or so on the way to work. Despite the fact that there is a perfectly good sidewalk built by the local council it's obvious that a lot of people must do the same as me, and opt for the faster route as well, because there's now a clearly worn path across the open ground, established by people choosing this path every day. Urban planners call these desire paths - the paths that people choose to take between two points regardless of other options that may be available to them.

If you look hard enough you'll find desire paths through your data as well. Your business intelligence solution offers many conventional paths (like the sidewalks built by my local council). These are the pre-built reports and other instruments that you present to your users. But I bet many of your users have built desire paths - the tips and tricks they use to get and analyse the information they need to do their everyday jobs. Or perhaps the extra things they have to do, those downloads and manipulations in Excel or the sneaky Access database sitting on a spare PC under someone's desk,  because your BI solution doesn't let them do their jobs or perform the analysis they need in its entirety. Now you could argue that desire paths in a BI solution actually represent a form of self-service BI. However, unless you've engineered things this way then you're probably only kidding yourself. Yes, desire paths are examples of your users finding ways to help themselves, but chances are that it's due to shortcomings, not features, within your BI solution.

Desire paths have a dark side in the natural world - they often result in trampled vegetation, can contribute to erosion and (not being as safe as constructed sidewalks) can also lead to injury for those using them. Similarly, in the IT world they are actually likely to cause harm to the reputation of your BI solution or of your BI team. Just like people in the natural world wandering a direct route desire path, shaking their head(s) and wondering why their local planning authority spent all that money building a meandering sidewalk twice as long as it needed to be, your users may well wonder where all of that IT spend on BI went, especially when they "can do the same thing (but better) in Excel". Perhaps worse still desire paths can cause actual harm to your organisation, be it financial or other type of loss, due to decisions based upon flawed analysis or data as desire paths can lack the checks and balances that come from underlying planning.

Our challenge as practitioners, managers and custodians of our organisations' BI assets is to find these desire paths (and in so doing also to find which of our pre-built paths are no longer as relevant as they could be). Can we build established footpaths where the users' desire paths have been worn in over months and years of usage? It works in the natural world and it can work in the technology world as well. There are stories of park planners in some countries visiting areas after fresh snowfall to get a sense of where those using the area are choosing to walk. I've heard of at least one university which built no structured sidewalks on a new campus until such time as the students established desire paths between buildings, simply choosing to pave these paths one year on.

In today's reality of shrinking budgets we all get busy just keeping our BI environments running and meeting the needs for new reports and analytics, let alone spending time worrying about how we'll deal with the next big (data) thing looming on the horizon. But I'd advocate there may be good value to be had in taking the opportunity to look for and act on desire paths when we can. The trick will be finding, or engineering, those occasions, like those times of fresh snowfall, when the circumstances are right to see the desire paths and incorporate key ones amongst them into your BI solution.

Happy (re)building!

Your BI Project Shouldn’t Be a Lag Activity

There's a school of thought which advocates that Business Intelligence work should lag behind the other pieces of a larger project and that one should never attempt to undertake business intelligence (BI) activities in parallel with the other "core" activities of the project. The line goes something like this: you can't undertake a major project, say the implementation of a new ERP system, and design and implement BI over that system at the same time; the BI components have to happen 6 months or so later, they can't be designed and built as part of the main project because they are dependent on the main project items being in place first. Those espousing this popular line would have us believe that one can't build BI until the system is up and running, there's a good volume of data available and the business users have worked out what reports they really want and need. Anyway, there's no rush - reports and other BI items are only an output after all!

I disagree. Business intelligence items are as much an input as an output. Yes, they draw upon data in the system, but, compliance reports aside, the information they present should be used as part of a decision making process which then causes some course of action to be taken in a larger process. If this isn't the case then I'd argue that the report in question adds no value. It may just as well not be there!

Look at the idea of doing the BI components at a lag behind the main project through another lens. What this is really saying is one of a few things: 

• We don't need the information we'd get from the reports to base decisions upon;

•  We’re happy coming up with and using a range of time consuming workarounds;

• We’ve got a good gut feel for the business. We can get by making guesses for a while; or

•  We can get by not doing some of the things that we used to do before we put this new system in place. This could be anything from something as simple as not providing team managers with trend reports of absenteeism through to things with much more potential for a financial sting in the tail such as not re-forecasting project budgets after the initial baseline as been set.

Also take some time to think about the resultant behaviors that may arise from not having reporting and analytic capability available early in the life of your new system. People in your business need to make choices and they need information to do so. If they can’t get it from BI, from the right channels, then they’ll find and develop a myriad of workarounds in attempts to continue to do their jobs. Wait too long to bring BI to the party and chances are a good number of those workarounds will persist in various pockets throughout your business. 

So I’d suggest a pause for reflection before rushing to adopt the common [BI] scheduling wisdom. Put it in the above terms, mull over it, have the leaders in your business consider it too and then see if there’s still the same appetite to defer that BI work for six months. Yes, bringing the BI work in to the main project isn’t easy, challenges abound, at times it feels like you’re building on shifting sands but the pain of not doing it may be much worse.

So That's What IT Recruiters Are Good For!

The BI Market seems to be fairly hot right now, at least in Australia, if the number of calls I'm getting from headhunters and IT Recruiters is any sort of indicator. However an experience I had this week makes me wonder.

Right now I have a need to ramp up the number of BI folks in our company to handle some project demands. It's a short term gig for the time being so we directly approached a few service firms as well as posting in one or two LinkedIn groups. Two days later I received an email from an IT Recruiter offering me the chance to interview for a great BI position with a first class company there were working very closely with. The position description felt very familiar and no wonder, I'd written most of it only a few days earlier. It had been augmented a bit to give the impression that what was in reality a short term engagement with a slim chance of extension was instead just the initial piece of a long engagement. A hunch had me checking Australia's main jobs website. Sure enough, two more recruiters were also advertising jobs which were also obviously the roles I was trying to fill. Both had extra or erroneous information, I suspect to make their version of the job more attractive than the one being advertised by their competitors.

Recruitment "consultants" taking initiative and creating opportunities to make income for themselves and their companies is one thing, but it causes problems for those of us working in, or managing those working in, the BI arena. With multiple parties now advertising my two roles now seemed like eight, so when those two are filled it will seem as if many more roles have been quickly filled. I suspect this contributes to the general feeling that demand is high and might even be artificially forcing rates up. Worse still will it cause a scenario where this perception of great demand draws people from other IT areas to re-train in the BI field, potentially causing a future glut of supply?

So let's be generous and say that recruitment consultants generate a buzz for us and drive potential candidates our way, but those of us with our own Human Resource Departments could do that anyway. What else do recruiters bring to the table? In my experience the majority of those I've dealt with lack any depth of understanding - matching skills and expertise to roles is haphazard at best, and even basic screening of applicants seems limited to "if they can spell BI then they're qualified to get a second interview".

So, for me I struggle to see the value..... But then I had an experience that made me realize that recruitment consultants do serve a valuable purpose - they're here to make us laugh. I was approached by a recruiter interested in my data warehousing expertise and keen to learn if I had a forklift license and what my typing speed was. I suspect data warehousing may have been a new term for him! Another, during a preliminary chat when I was trying to find a candidate to fill a new data warehousing role, asked me if I felt rising real estate costs would make warehouse space more expensive and cause my firm to lift our rates.

So, guys, keep the laughs coming, but you'll excuse me if I pass on your other offerings!

Big Data - Is it Really New?

Despite the fact that Big Data is fastest becoming one of the buzz words in the data industry I still wonder if we yet know exactly what it is. Is it anything more than just a concept, an umbrella topic if you like, to attempt to signal that something new is beginning to emerge in our industry? But, is big data really something new? Is the buzz justified, do we really need to reinvent our approaches, our practices and the skills we engender in those coming up through data careers?

I’d argue that some, if not many, data professionals already know a thing or two about big data. Well over a decade ago I was the architect leading a project to build a data warehouse to handle call traffic and billing data for one of Australia’s biggest telecommunications companies. Back then the volume of data we were working with was hardly small and I’d suggest that those that the people who work with that warehouse, and the BI solutions in enables, today are facing even larger data volumes thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones and other devices. We found ways of handling the challenges that the volume of data posed and more than a few of these approaches would still work today, even without the additional leg up we now get from increased computing power.

But what of the other characteristics of big data? It’s not just volume that’s the challenge with big data, but the velocity too. I’ve heard some commentators discussing that it is the rate at which data arrives which is in fact the biggest issue that comes with big data. But we’ve been dealing with high velocity data for a while now as well. Complex event processing has been available in major database products for at least a few years and people working with any form of operational technology will be used to data flowing in from sensors and other protection or control devices at millisecond intervals.

So I believe that we can leverage much of what we already know and practice as data professionals to start to address the volume and velocity aspects of [structured] big data. It’s the complexity and variety aspects of big data that I think will give us the real problems we need to deal with. The problem of making, or taking, the correct meaning from unstructured data, especially that coming from outside our organisations, such as sentiment analysis from social media, and then somehow find a way to effectively integrate it with our structured data sets is where I believe we’ll find our headaches. It’s here that we’ll need innovative new tools and techniques, but even then I think they’ll rely on key areas and practices which at least some of us have worked with for a while. Metadata will play a big role here to establish the right context and data mining may well make an appearance as well.

So, in my opinion at least, we already know a thing or two about big data. Let’s not re-invent the wheel, but rather try to build on what we’ve learned in the past. It’s a novel idea I know, and perhaps not one that IT professionals have much of a proven track record with, but hopefully this type of approach might shorten the time to value for those making early investments in and around big data.

BI - It's Not Just Reporting

Many times across my career I've been frustrated by what is, in my opinion, a gross under utilisation of business intelligence tools, platforms and even functions and teams such as Business Intelligence Competency Centres. All too often significant investment has been made in purchasing software, building data warehouses and other solutions, training staff and hiring external consultants, only to have this considerable horsepower and potential being set to work on (just) "the reporting".

Building BI solutions often comes at considerable cost in both time and money and if the chief item provided is purely a set of static reports that tell us what has happened in our organisations then someone, somewhere (and probably somewhere higher up in the organisational chart) will sooner or later start to question the wisdom of the investment. And that's not just a problem for the here and now of the current project, but for the future too. If he has been tainted as to the general value of business intelligence then he may well push back against future initiatives in the area, potentially robbing the organisation of future competitive advantage or effectiveness gains. The problem is made worse still when the default approach to setting project scope is to examine the set of existing reports available from in and around the incumbent solution. In this case the company will have a shiny new toy and (maybe) a prettier set of reports, but may not have gained much in the way of additional business value or actionable insight.

We need to remember that BI offers the potential for much more than just reporting. This was true well over a decade ago and is even more true today with the technology and tool advances we've seen between then and now. Just look at the name: BI, that's Business intelligence folks - intelligence for the business. Simply knowing what happened (via a report), for the sake of compliance, audit or because the procedures say we need to have a piece of paper punched and filed on a shelf, really does little for the running of the business, let alone its advancement. BI should be about helping make decisions that better the business, that help it carry out its operations in the best way possible.

The term "decision support" may seem a bit old school, but perhaps it does capture what BI can offer to the business other than just "the reports". Recently I heard the phrase "the three tenses of BI" and it resonated with me. The first phase is historical - this is the looking back, telling us what happened, function of BI - these are the reports that so often get developed as the majority, or even the entirety, of a BI project. The second tense is the present tense. BI instruments in this area tell us what is happening right now. Reports can serve this function too, but often they miss a key component that stops them playing an effective role. Whatever is used here, be it reports, OLAP components or some type of complex event processing, the information conveyed must be provided in a form and in a time frame that allows it to be used by the recipients in a manner and a timeliness which causes a change which benefits the business that would not otherwise have occurred. The third tense of BI looks to the future - using not only internal information but also looking at wider information sets to try and predict what may happen in the future in and around the organization, thereby providing food for thought for those setting the strategic direction for the organization. What's important to note there is that the second and third tenses of BI require information and intelligence to be presented in order not just to enable decisions to be made, but perhaps also go so far as to highlight that decisions should, or even must, be made.

Simply having a great set of tools available isn't enough. If we want to move on from being perceived as just report writers then it's up to us, as BI professionals, to educate others as to the potential of BI, challenging and assisting them to find ways in which it can be better used across our organisations. So go on, take the first step - share this blog post :)